Following are outputs from osstest, ossinfo, ossdetect. During osstest, I do hear sound (headphones only confirmed - no other speakers attached to this machine - onboard Intel audio ASUS P5K-E motherboard), but i can't get sound in applications (youtube in Firefox for instance) - only during the test. Any help is appreciated.

I think what happens is that only /dev/oss/hdaudio1/pcm4 plays sounds. Apps try to open /dev/dsp, which is probably symlinked to /dev/oss/hdaudio1/pcm0, and can't play anything. Do "ln -sf /dev/oss/hdaudio1/pcm4 /dev/dsp", and it will probably work. You can test with "ossplay" program.

osstest produced normal sound through the headphones previously and still does. Not a clue what other device node should be symlinked - /dev/oss/hdaudio1/pcm4 is what delivers sound during osstest. Below are the dsp links in /dev - other mods needed maybe?

OK. Let's try this:
A. Play a file with ossplay (ossplay supports mostly the same files as audioplay). Check the volume. It's probably faint?
B. Play a file with ossplay using the "-R" switch (this has the effect that ossplay may have to reject the file. Just search around until you find one which ossplay accepts [edit: Or you can convert a file to a format ossplay will accept]). If I'm guessing correctly, it won't be faint.

Ripped a file from CD using Sound Juicer (comes with OpenSolaris install). Tried several diff formats with ossplay - ogg and flac not supported. wav produces loud screeching white noise - definitely not faint. On a lark, downloaded a random .au file from the web - interestingly that plays in ossplay perfectly - good volume, no issues. It dies on the -R switch though. Can't get anything to work on the -R switch. But that may not matter since regular ossplay is working for the .au file. Tried playing the .au file in RhythmBox - same faint sound that I'm getting in apps (youtube in Firefox for instance). ossplay seems to be ok; but sound continues to be faint in apps for some reason. Output for these is below.

Interesting... I suspect that apps which output directly to OSS are fine, while apps which try to output to /dev/audio (converted by sadasupport to OSS API) have the faint volume problem... I suspect audioplay will have the volume issue too on that .au file, does it?
You can compile quite a few programs via SFE which can allow us to verify this further, like xmms.

If this is the case, I don't know how it fix it - I'm a Linux user - maybe there's another mixer control program which needs to be activated? audioctl? You could also recompile stuff to use OSS directly (SFE helps here I guess).

[edit: P.S. Can you put the wav file somewhere I can get it? I want to examine it. ossplay should play most wav files well... ]